A Temple Looming, by Lenard Moore

ISBN 978-1934999103, 80 pages, $17.00
A Temple Looming by Lenard D. Moore is a series of portraits, painstakingly rendered, that capture the nuances of the African-Americans whose lives inspired them:
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Splendid in uniform,
the barrel-straight stare
of his pure black face
shines like a bullet.

Imagine he’d not returned
from the Great War,
leaving a void in his family,
and in this picture.

Moore’s artistry preserves what might otherwise be lost: human lives, and their world.

“A Temple Looming is a caring look into records of our African love, our will to life. Moore is ever the guardian, watching the darkening way, listening for our song.”—Afaa M. Weaver, Editor of OBSIDIAN II

“John Milton said ‘poetry should be simple, sensuous, and impassioned.’ Cousin Lenard is surely in that tradition of prosody and hope. Read on.”—Michael S. Harper



Lenard D. Moore was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina. After graduating from high school and attending two years of college at Coastal Carolina Community College, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and had basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. He later earned a B.A. from Shaw University, and an M.A. in English and African American Literature from North Carolina A&T State University. Moore is a former Writer-in-Residence for the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. He is the founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective and co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group. He is President of the Haiku Society of America. He is the founding editor of The CAAWC Newsletter. He also is the executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. Moore has taught at Enloe High School, North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro), North Carolina State University (Raleigh) and Shaw University, and now teaches at Mount Olive College, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and directs the MOC Literary Festival and advises The Trojan Voices (former known as The Olive Branch), the MOC literary journal.e. He was also the publicity He lives with his wife in Raleigh, North Carolina. (For more about Lenard Moore go to the Wordtech site listed above.)



FRAMED

The woman
in the photo
looks like Aunt Muriel:
fair-skinned, thin nose,
full lips, broad brows,
flat forehead, and hair
long on both sides
but curled at its ends.
Her poised body,
so full
of pride in a house-cleaning world,
wears a checkered cotton dress
the way Aunt Muriel did.
The scene is somber:
she is so square
to the camera,
just right
in time’s lilac deepening
for claiming kin
nearly forgotten.



---------------------

EVALENE

I like the way you sit:
sideways, legs crossed,
cotton skirt tight
below knobby knees,
left hand on
the higher knee,
and right hand on
the chair’s round back.

I like the way you pose:
twisted around
on the chair, without words;
stiff, head tilted
towards the left shoulder;
no lines, no circles
below the eyes.

I like the way you wait:
wearing a straw hat
ringed with white flowers
like it ain’t nobody’s business;
lips glossed and puckered
as if they were fixed for a kiss;
white shirt, matching jacket,
sweet baby, as if you were kin to me.

------------------
GENERATIONS

A family of four poses,
close enough to keep out light,
two girls, little, wholly thin.

Mother smiles, child in lap,
rests chin on daughter’s head
is unearthly, could praise and sing
until notes, one by one, burst plum red.

Father has his right hand on other girl’s shoulder.
She leans against her sister whose hands are clasped.
Mother leans toward her husband, could take wing.

The man tilts toward his wife,
not fully touching; yet, a gleam
in their eyes baits and burns out strife.

--------------------------
THE OLD SYCAMORE’S LIMBS

hang over the one-lane road I walk.
Leaves lie scattered,
wind stirred.
Over the rise
across the lane:
a stand of longleaf pine,
spaced just enough to hold ghosts
behind an uneven fence.

Up the road, morning light
whitewashes everything,
creates a brilliant tunnel.
I wonder if the road remains
a bed for autumn-brown leaves
on the daystar’s other side.

No animals,
no houses between the pines.
Mist settles everywhere.
Only the sycamore is old enough
to know what might have been.
How its curved arms scratch
the bright blue sheet of sky,
wait for whatever spirit comes
to enter its dark rings.












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